“Lomiga Lua: i Luga ‘o le Moana”
Leitu Bonnici
27 May → 8 July 2023
Window

A screen leaning behind a shallow window display, on its side. The screen depicts a deep blue landscape with the silhouette of a tree in the bottom corner. There are shades of clowd.
Leitu Bonninci, 'Lomiga Lua: i Luga ‘o le Moana', 2023, installation view, West Space Window, Collingwood Yards. Photography by Janelle Low.

In Leitu Bonnici's West Space Window Lomiga Lua: i Luga ‘o le Moana, language, imagery and colour are employed to explore the link between ‘āiga across waters and geographies despite physical distance from each other, and from Sāmoa.

Lomiga Lua: i Luga ‘o le Moana features text formed through connection, memory and shared interactions by ‘āiga in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), on Kombumerri Country (Gold Coast) and in Kirikiriroa (Hamilton).

The word ‘sami’ is used to describe the sea or ocean in gagana Sāmoa, but the word ‘moana’ can also be used and is shared as the word for ocean across multiple island nations of Moana Oceania. It can also mean the colour blue in gagana Sāmoa, as in ‘lanumoana’. On the internet, blue is the default colour used to denote connection to other destinations in the form of hyperlinks.

Taking both this text and colour as a starting point, Leitu then digitally constructed interpretations of the ocean that use a mixture of illustration, code, three-dimensional digital modelling and footage taken in Sāmoa.

Developed in collaboration with Alitasi Fatu, Denise Roberts, Moira Roberts and Numiamalepule Adrian Tuitama. The West Space Window is supported by City of Yarra through their Annual Arts Grants Program.

A screen leaning behind a shallow window display, on its side. The screen depicts a deep blue landscape with the silhouette of a tree in the bottom corner. There are shades of clowd.
A screen leaning behind a shallow window display, on its side. The screen depicts a deep blue landscape with the silhouette of a tree in the bottom corner. There are shades of clowd.
A screen leaning behind a shallow window display, on its side. The screen depicts a deep blue landscape with the silhouette of a tree in the bottom corner. There are shades of clowd.

Leitu Bonnici is a graphic designer, filmmaker and artist based between Naarm (Melbourne) and the Netherlands. As a tagata Sāmoa, they are proud to belong to the Great Ocean, which spans over a third of the world’s surface and is home to diverse continuing Indigenous histories that span thousands of years. Their practice critically examines ‘the archive’ and ‘the publication’, utilising various interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary methodologies that challenge pālagi myths (inaccurate narratives plotted along contrived linear timeframes that are granted unearned authority by Eurocentric forms of information collation and dissemination).